“...I hear the sounds of melting snow outside my window every night and with the first faint scent of spring, I remember life exists...”

“All my life I've felt on the outside wherever I am - out of the picture, the conversation, at a distance, as though I were the only one able to hear the sounds or words that other's can't, and deaf to the words that they hear. As if I'm outside the frame, on the other side of a huge, invisible window.”

“ Outside, a birch tree bends from the weight of the snow. it'll spring back up once the snow melts, back to its normal, upright self. could that happen to me ?”

“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.”

“Every day stole away more of her presence, leaving in its place faint wisps of memories devoid of color, scent, and sound.”

“I learned two important things about the sound I was searching for: that it had to be indirect, refracted or muffled in some way; and that the sound had to give the impression that it would continue forever- the sound of someone practicing piano heard faintly from an unknown direction, or the sound of gentle rain outside a window, punctuated by drops falling on the casement.”